Sally and Ryan’s mother faced a situation that all parents often face. There were two brownies left for her two young children – and one was bigger than the other. It did not take long for the two children to argue about who would get the bigger piece. This time, the mother tried a new approach drawing on her experience teaching faith formation: “What would Jesus do?” she asked.
Silence. Both children knew enough to know that what they might say might be used against them. But their silence did not deter their mother from imparting her wisdom: “Well, I think I know what he would say. He would say, ‘why don’t you take the larger piece?’”
To which Sally said, “Then, can Ryan be Jesus?”
“No fair!” It is the cry that every child learns at a young age. Woe to the parents who do not render precisely equal justice to each one of their children! “No fair!” – actually those are words we do not outgrow. As Stephen Shoemaker points out, a sense of justice has been hardwired into our very being: “we have all been supplied by God with a…fairness meter.”[1]
Anytime anybody gets more than we do for the same effort, an alarm goes off and it screams, “No fair!”
When our parent wrongly accuses us of doing what a brother or sister did;
When a coach does not choose us to start, or a director does not choose us for a part, because they are playing favorites;
When we do all of the work but our supervisor gets all of the credit;
When our tax assessment is much higher than those of our neighbors.
Justice. We have that fairness meter inside of us, an inbred sense of what fair play demands. Here is a problem with our fairness meters, however. The meter is quite sensitive when we are the ones who are the victims of injustice. But how does it function with others? Because of sin’s presence in our lives, the meter does not work so well when others are wronged. Sometimes, the meter barely registers a tiny blip and we have only a hint of moral outrage for what deserves far more. Other times, when we are part of the problem – or a beneficiary of the unfairness – the meter may not register at all.
Hear the words of that prophet Amos again: “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” What is this justice – and this righteousness that Amos pairs with it?
As the Biblical scholar Jim Mays points out, “justice,” or “mishpat” in Hebrew, refers to the court that could be found near one of the prominent gates. To do justice means fairness in the courts, especially that the interests of the poor and weak are to be protected through the help of the court. “Righteousness” or “sedaqa” in the Hebrew refers not to personal righteousness, but to social righteousness. For the Jews, their society was not a collection of individuals with rights but a web of relationships with responsibilities for treating each other fairly and taking care of each other.[2]
Amos’ words therefore expand and deepen our understanding of what it means to “do justice.” To do justice is not just to ensure a fair process but to ensure that all people have enough – enough food, enough help, and enough love. One implication is that we pay special attention to those who do not have enough – people like those mentioned by Amos and Jesus in Luke 4: the poor, the needy, prisoners, the blind, and the weak. Because when you understand that we are part of a web of relationships, we want to treat others the way we want to be treated. And we understand that because of our ties to each other, what happens to one person in the web, especially those most in need, should matter to the rest of us.
Living rightly with God and with God’s people, caring for the poor and weak. This is what the word, “justice” means in the Bible. But “justice” is a big and abstract idea – how are we to do it? How can justice roll down like a waterfall? How can that stream keep flowing? Here are three thoughts.
First, think about heaven and pay attention to what is happening on the earth.
What is justice? What does God want us to do? Consider heaven. Do we think that there will be hungry people there? Do we think that the people’s health will depend on whether they have access to affordable medical care? Do we think that we will see the disparities between rich and poor that exist in the world today? Do we think that people will be treated according to their gender, skin color, or nation of birth in heaven?
Picture heaven, and then live in such a way to make this life look like heaven. To do justice is to close the gap between the ways things are when we rule and the way things are when God rules. Not just at the holidays, but throughout the year, day after day, year after year.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” the prayer we pray each week also calls us to pay attention to life on earth. We need to pay attention to the victims of injustice, to those who are not experiencing the good life that God wants all of God’s children to have. Who do we drive by but do not notice? Who do we pass by but not listen to? What stories tell of injustice that we ignore?
As I noted before, our inbred fairness meter is thrown off by sin. We are quick to see the injustices done to us, or our group, but slow to notice, and slow to react to, the injustices done to others or groups we are not part of. Woe to us! For, as Amos tells us, complacency to injustice Monday through Saturday makes our worship on Sunday offensive to God!
If you have traveled in Britain then at some point you have seen the sign, “Mind the gap” – the gap between train and platform. To do justice is to mind the gap between heaven and earth.
Second, doing justice means understanding that difficult problems require more than superficial solutions.
At the cornerstone of training for those who provide emergency care is the “ABC” protocol for trauma resuscitation: “airway,” “breathing,” and “circulation.” When you come upon a seriously injured or unconscious person, you need to stop the bleeding and be sure that they can breathe. You do that first, but that does not mean, of course, that a doctor or emergency responder will stop there. There may be broken bones to set, surgeries to undertake after that initial emergency is addressed.
In the same way, justice means to stop the bleeding, by feeding the hungry, providing temporary shelter to those without housing, being sure a family is safe from violence. But justice also means going beyond those emergency needs to seek longer-term solutions. As Bishop Tutu once put it in his imitable way, a quote I shared with you a few weeks back: “at some point when you keep rescuing people and pulling them out of the river, you need to go upstream and see why they are falling into the river in the first place (paraphrased).
That is why this congregation says in its fifth core value that “we feel called to work with mission partners in response not only to immediate emergency needs but also long-term needs, and not only to give charity, but also to work for justice and dignity for all.” And that is why the FaithFULL Housing team is hoping that this year we can not only raise awareness of the needs of the unhoused and raise money to help them immediately locally and overseas. But they are also hoping that we might seek ways to partner with others in the Lehigh Valley and work long-term to help create more affordable housing.
When we listen to the Bible and passages like Amos 5 and Luke 4, we cannot help but hear the call to help those on the margins, those in need, the least of these. Surely, we must agree about our ultimate destination when it comes to how we treat people in our society. But, just as surely, we may often disagree about the best way to get there, about how much to rely on the public sector or the private sector, for example, or how best to respond to those in need so you are not enabling further dependence and struggle.
I was listening to a podcast last week of two of my favorite people: Adam Grant, a professor at Penn’s Wharton School of Business and Trevor Noah, a comedian and author of a poignant memoir of growing up mixed-race under apartheid in South Africa. Grant asked Noah as an outsider to name two things that surprised him about America. On the positive side, Noah cited the friendliness and helpfulness of Americans – and he was referring to New York City! On the negative side, he said that he was surprised how often Americans thought, because of their two-party government that there only two solutions to any social problem. In contrast, in other parts of the world with multiple parties, there seemed to be much more of an awareness of multiple possible solutions.
The problem with only two solutions of course is that it tends to fall into two categories – “my solution” and “your solution.” Which means the conflict can become quite personal and you are either a winner or loser. But here is an alternative possibility to consider: perhaps one way we Christians can contribute to discussions regarding justice and complex issues is by modeling humility and a willingness to listen and learn, as well as speak and act. And, as worshippers of a God, who for some reason created something like 400,000 species just of beetles, we might also model being creative and open to more than 2 solutions to any given problem.
Finally, when it comes to doing justice, we persist by faith and hope.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the injustices in the world. It is natural to feel that our efforts are insignificant when compared to the size of the problems all around us. It is understandable that we often feel like the bad guys are winning, that injustice prevails more than justice. But we are a people of faith and hope
Nicholas Kristof is a Pulitzer-writing columnist who has spent much of his career going into dangerous and dark places to tell the story of the abuse of women or genocide in Darfur, or the horrors of war. But in his recent memoir, Chasing Hope, he talks about how covering genocide and poverty has led him to hope. For one reason, he has seen evidence of incredible trends that often aren’t reported in media or politics that focuses on the negative: “For most of the last twenty years or so, we could have run a front-page headline reading: ‘Another 170,000 People Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.’ Or: ‘Another 200,000 People Get Piped Water for the First Time Today.’ Or: ‘Another 325,000 People Today Get Electricity for the First Time.’ Those are the real figures for the number of people,” he writes, “lifted out of extreme poverty or gaining running water or electricity on an average day around the world.”[3] The second reason he has hope, he writes, are the “selfless souls” he has witnessed “struggling to do justice around the world,” because “’each time someone stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [they] send forth a tiny ripple of hope.’”[4]
Often in our quest for justice, we too will find reason for hope in the day-to-day heroism and compassion we witness, and in subtle improvements that others may not see. But ultimately our hope is based on God – and not on human efforts. Our hope rests in the truth that God’s ways and God’s justice will prevail in the end. The river of God’s justice flows without our help. We just need to let it flow through us.
Sojourner Truth, the freed slave and abolitionist went around preaching against the ills of slavery before the Civil War. On one occasion, she was accosted by a man who said to her: “Old woman, do you think your talk about slavery does any good? Do you suppose people care what you say? Why, I don’t care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea.” “Perhaps not,” she replied, “but the Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.”[5]
Friends, let’s keep them scratching. So that, justice might roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
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[1] The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome: A New Encounter with the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Lively Virtues (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 138.
[2] James Luther Mays, Amos (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 108, 92.
[3] Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), 330.
[4] Kristof, 331 (quoting in part, Robert F. Kennedy).
[5] C. Douglas Weaver, A Cloud of Witnesses (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 1993), 147.
